Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)

This gorgeous visible-light
Hubble Space Telescope image shows a
young
cluster of massive stars at the center of the
30 Doradus Nebula.
Gas and dust clouds in 30 Doradus, also known as the
Tarantula Nebula,
have been sculpted into elongated shapes by
powerful winds and ultraviolet radiation from these
hot cluster stars.

Why does the Crab Nebula
still glow? In the year 1054 A.D. a
supernova
was observed that left a nebula that even today
glows brightly in every color possible, across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
At the nebula's center is an ultra-dense
neutron star
that rotates 30 times a second.

Explorers often discover the
unexpected.
Such was the case when the
Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey
chanced upon the unusual object circled in the
above photograph.
The so-called
mystery object appeared star-like but
displayed colors unlike most stars or quasars.

The disk of our
Milky Way Galaxy is home to hot nebulae,
cold dust, and billions of stars.
The red nebulae visible in the above contrast-enhanced picture are primarily
emission nebulae,
glowing clouds of hydrogen gas heated by nearby, bright, young stars.

M83 is a bright spiral galaxy
that can be found with a small telescope in the constellation of Hydra.
It takes light about 15 million years to reach us from
M83.
M83 is quite a typical spiral - much like our own
Milky Way
Galaxy.

The awesome spectacle of starbirth produces extreme stellar
winds and
intense energetic starlight -- bombarding dusty molecular clouds
inside the Lagoon Nebula
(M8).
At least
two long funnel shaped clouds, each roughly half a light-year
long, have apparently been formed by this activity.

Intense
ultraviolet light from massive, hot stars in
the Orion region has sculpted and
compressed clouds of dust and gas in to
distinctively shaped Cometary Globules.
Seen in this IRAS
infrared image recorded...

Today, the Sun crosses the
celestial equator and
seasons change from Summer to Fall
in the north and Winter to Spring in the southern hemisphere.
Defined by the Sun's position in sky
the event is known as an equinox -
the length of daylight is
equal to the length of night.

Bright clusters of stars form and disperse near the
center of our Galaxy.
Four million years ago the Quintuplet Cluster,
pictured above, formed and is now slowly dispersing.
The Quintuplet Cluster is located within 100
light-years of the
Galactic center,
and is home to the brightest star yet cataloged in our Galaxy: the
Pistol Star.